Mozilla Firefox 0.9 Release Candidate Available

Wednesday June 9th, 2004

Ben Goodger writes: "A testing candidate of Mozilla Firefox 0.9 is now available from mozilla.org. There are a couple more bugs we'd like to fix for the 0.9 release but want to get as much feedback on the app in general before we go out. Please download this build and test with it and report any show stopping bugs that you find. We are still looking to do a 0.9 final sometime Monday." Builds can be found on the FTP site.

"switch (not necessarily browser, but the skin"
Except that installing new themes doesn't work at all, at least here on my fresh install - vanilly profile on Mandrake Linux 10.0. See the problems I see in the forums <http://forums.mozillazine…org/viewtopic.php?t=83227> I first need confirmation before I file all these bug reports. Don't want to waste my time...

I do not pretend to know the truth of the conflicting stories about the licensing efforts, but I do find it interesting that the now no longer default theme freely available for download by individual users. Something just does not make sense about this situation.

That's simple: it's the difference between "free beer" (which is just something gotten for nothing - you aren't always entitled to it) and "free speech" (a fundamental right to which everyone is entitled). Check out <http://www.gnu.org/> and you'll find more explanations of this difference.

It isn't. According to Kevin Gerich: "The new theme, dubbed "Winstripe" by Ben Goodger, is barely a first draft. I wouldn't have chosen to release the theme in its current state, but Ben and crew wanted to replace Qute for 0.9 and start working on a unified identity across platforms."

I personally think it is a serious mistake to release a new Firefox milestone (bearing in mind we are approaching 1.0 rapidly) with a new default theme that is 'barely a first draft', but unfortunately any sensible discussion about this matter has become impossible with all the flaming going on in the forums. I hope Kevin will be able to make some refinements before the actual milestone is shipped, but I think it would have been much better to wait for the 1.0 beta's. Of course that's not Kevin's fault.

There seems to be a lot of agreement that it should NOT ship with 0.9, Qute was perfect, just perfect - This is not.
It will do more harm than good, if you release a milestone and end-users don't know the theme is alpha, they will think it's the final product.

I must admit I haven't tried a build recently, but the extension management stuff also seems to have been rather rushed - there were known problems up until yesterday, and a bunch of fixes just applied and not yet tested. I'm sure there's going to be a bunch more fixing done before 0.9 (so I guess this isn't really a release candidate, as such).

And while 0.9 might be a milestone, it's still pre-beta. If 0.9 isn't as good as 0.8 in some ways, then so be it - the goal is that 1.0 is good.

According to the roadmap, version 1.0 isn't far away. As it is, we're all aware that many websites and magazines have been promoting Firefox as a browser of choice, even in its pre-release state. It's become very popular, and knowing this but arguing to screw up the UI due to it being a pre-release is an example of developers being pricks and hair-splitting by people disconnected from reality or wanting to be part of some irrelevant clique. Screwing up the UI will destroy a lot of momentum and goodwill that we have going forward as well as alienate users from the project.

Look, I am sure that Ben already heard your view. We all know that a large part of the community thinks just like you, why all this repetition? Anyway, once you do use winsripe it's not all that bad. It should become even better. The momentun and the goodwill can destroyed by constant scaremongers like you not by the decisions of the Devs. Winstripe is here to stay! If you really care for this project, I would suggest you stop whining and perhaps try to improve the winstripe theme.

Not all that bad? If that's the best defense that can be mounted for it, it should go back in the oven until it's done.

I've been withholding judgment until I actually saw the theme in action, but I just grabbed the RC and I concur that it's a significant step backwards from Qute (which I didn't like very much to begin with, so that's saying something).

The capacity of this project to repeatedly shoot itself in the foot never ceases to amaze me.

Right. Always used MostlyCrystal, never Qute, don't care much for it. Winstripe looks ok (imho 'cleaner' than Qute, curious about the 1.0 version of the theme), but I probably won't use it either.

And it's perfectly sensible to ship Winstripe with 0.9, even though it is a very early version. After all, would shipping 1.0 with a brand new theme without much user feedback make sense? It doesn't to me, better to get it in before that.

I agree that the theme is not something I would have chosen myself, but I think some of comments are a bit harsh--I don't think it will scare people off, for instance. And it's not like anyone is stuck with this once some new themes come out.

It's not just themes. Some of the extensions are disappearing from the extension list after being installed (though they still function). However, I think any extensions and themes that don't have 0.9 in mind will be hidden.

I think it's worse than that. The latest Adblock, my favorite extension, won't even let the browser window start - at least that's how it was with several very recent nightlies. Frustrated, I restored my OS partition from backup, installed 0.8 and I've been very happy since. I used the suite until recently and scoffed at Firefox for a while, but now that I manually set the prefs as I like them, I think 0.8 is just brilliant. <P>

My advice to people who rely on extensions and non-default themes: Don't upgrade from 0.8! It looks like 0.9 will be a bit of a trainsitional bastard, all for the sake of an excellent 1.0, I hope!

I think this extensions issue is bigger than what theme is there by default. The old extensions installing then disappearing from the list was reported as a bug (<http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=246043> - Bug #246043) but then it was disregarded as an invalid. Yes, the extensions are now "broken", but the end user shouldn't have to deal with this. The old extensions should not be allowed to install (similar to what happens when you try to install an incompatible theme), or at the very least a warning sign should come up about potential problems.

The UI design has improved a lot since I last looked: preferences are now under edit again, where they belong. And the extion/theme managers are a good idea. However there are still a few UI issues where the UI is much worse than in Seamonkey: the tree views in the preference dialog are just terrible. Save to Desktop as a default is nonsense under Linux (and IMO under Windows too). And why, please, why, is there a close tab button in the right of the tab bar but no new tab button in the left??? Especially the latter annoys me a lot - and I think it is so basic that I should not need an extension for it.
BUG: the three icons in the top right of the save as dialog do not show in my Linux XFT build.

Speaking of the "close tab" button, it doesn't provide enough visual feedback on hover. It's the only aspect of this theme that seems to hinder functionality.

I don't mind the icons so much -- I'd still use Firefox even if the they were rendered in crayon by a pre-schooler -- and I don't think they look too tragic thus far, but I certainly hope they improve the design significantly in small icons mode, because they're not incredibly attractive and take up nearly as much space as the large ones. (At least in Windows 2000 and in "Windows Classic" under XP; I haven't looked at it with Luna yet.)

On the Windoz platform:
" Do not install Firefox over the top of another Firefox installation. If you want to install Firefox 0.9 into the same folder that you had Firefox 0.8 in, uninstall Firefox 0.8 first. Upgrading will be fixed in a future release."

I was hoping that upgrading will be as easy as migration (in 0.9) especially that 1.0 will feature mainly bug fixes and stability improvements.

Well, the RC is a specific build (somewhere between yesterday's branch nightly and today's branch nightly), but there's nothing particularly special about it in terms of the build configuration. It's just an aviary branch build that has been renamed and moved to the 0.9RC folder, and announced as a release candidate, in order to get some testing from people that don't normally keep up with current nightlies.

That theme is seriously ugly in its current form, it will literally scare new users away. Days of work just for this, when they already had perfect theme. I'm sure that they would been able to hammer a deal with original theme creator...if they wanted. Welcome to the world of yesterday...Win95-era...but hey, icon still looks nice, but doesn't fit to rest of the browser.

I can agree with it. I would like to promote Firefox in my country, and it is easier to promote a product with design I (and a lot of people) like, instead of promoting it with the current design. The design change in the current state of this new design, and in the current state of the old one is unnecessary and a bad decision. Not just I say it, 90% of people say it around. Is there anybody hearing these voices, or you shut your eyes and stop hearing the community? I just some people say it, it's okay, to ignore it, if most of the people say it, it's a mistake.

It's NOT LATE to switch the design back, and get in at version 1.0, if it is in the state, that people will think, the change will OK. I'll be there, and I'll will say, it's OK. But not now, please, with this 0.1 version!

There were license problems with the old design in that the author refused to put it under the standard mozilla.org tri-license (MPL|GPL|LGPL). Feel free to contribute a new theme, tri-license it, and defend its superiority over Winstripe to the Firefox drivers.

This is not true. Please see the thread at <http://forums.mozillazine…stsperpage=15&start=0>
To paraphrase: the old theme author expressed reservations a few months ago. No further discussions were made, and then all the sudden a new theme is checked in and the author states that he probably would have folded to the tri-license if it meant keeping his theme in, but the drivers simply didn't communicate with him. (flames ensue)

I have to say, as a regular firefox user and an outsider looking in, this looks bad. It does not look like the claim that Arvid was entirely unwilling to use the trilicense holds true. There has to be some mozilla.org response to disprove what Arvid is saying. It would help to see Arvid's mail that made the mozilla.org people believe he wasn't going to relicense.

More importantly, these issues should not have been settled in private email (which is what caused the problem in the first place). This should have been settled in a bug to make default artwork trilicensed. I hope future project issues will not be relegated to private email but put in the bug system where they belong. I realise email is more convenient, but email also makes the project closed off to the outside world. Mozilla.org, as an open source leader, should hold to a higher standard of communication with the userbase.

This is an issue regardless of the comparative qualities of the artwork. Miscommunication like this should not be able to happen.

Ofcourse, my position as "just a user" doesn't give me much room for valid criticism.

I had one of the worst upgrade installations to Firefox than I've ever had. I had a second profile accidently created in Firefox 0.8, and unfortunately, 0.9 migrated the wrong profile. So I had to fish my way into the bookmarks editor to merge the correct bookmarks list into the new Firefox, and even with that, I have to find all the extensions & themes and install them manually.

Since I installed each version of Firefox in a new folder, I've noticed that you can't launch Firefox 0.9 while 0.8 is running (or vice versa.) If you try, you get another window of whatever version is already running.

Yes - you shouldn't run two instances with the same profile at the same time, as it can cause problems, particularly if you try and change settings or add bookmarks or whatever (whichever gets in last will just overwrite the changes made by the other instance).

Is this a good place to flag this sort of thing? Never quite sure about using bugzilla for rc builds.

I don't have Mozilla installed. If I select File->Import->Netscape 6,7 or Mozilla 1.x and click Next, Firefox 0.9RC1 crashes without fail. :-( All the other import options take me to the next screen without any problems.

The new FireFox seems to be quite a bit speedier, and that's the bit I like.

However, I very much dislike the new toolbar icons, and I'm quite unhappy about the fact it didn't migrate my default profile. I copy-pasted some files, but it seems that it didn't pick up all my saved form info / passwords.

But what's worse, it doesn't work for me for some things! I cannot log in anymore to my WebSphere server, something that has never been any problem with any version of Mozilla and certainly worked very well with FireFox 0.8!
I click on the 'login' button, which btw doesn't look like a regular WinXP button, and nothing happens. Nothing. It just sits there, happily, not even moving it's throbber. It seems as if it just doesn't submit the page...

I'm afraid I'll have to go back to 0.8 until a new version comes along that does work with my WebSphere login page.

Other nitpicks / things I dislike:
- The shortcut-key for the download manager has changed :-( What was wrong with ctrl-e ?
- The download manager had a very nice background pick in it's list. That looked very cool. It's gone now... The list looks a lot less cool now :-(
- The installer still says it's the FireFox 0.8 installer

That's all the grunts for now; I think I'll quickly downgrade now to 0.8 and then I'll check out the next RC to see if it fixes anything.

I personally like the new throbber. However it doesnt scale if i wish to lower it down to the area where all the other buttons are. However i know the theme isnt complete yet so hopefully this will be addressed

Ctrl-D has been Bookmark this Page practically since the days of Netscape 1.0. Do you know how many pages expect that shortcut will add the page to bookmarks/favorites? Do a search or two...it's most certainly *not* a good idea to use Ctrl-D

"Ok, fair enough. Can't say that ctrl-e was a particularly *logical* key anyways for me, but I didn't see a reason to change it either."

I believe it was chosen for IE compatibility. Sort of.

In the beginning Firefox (nee Firebird nee Phoenix nee mozilla/browser) had three sidebars: Bookmarks, History and Downloads. This concept of sidebars was clearly based on Internet Explorer's Explorer bars. The original three Explorer bars were Search, Favorites and History (there's also Folders - a result of the Web browser/file browser integration and they've since added Media). For History, Firefox matched IE's shortcut key of Accelerator+H (which is also the shortcut for the History window in the Mozilla Application Suite and Netscape before that). For Bookmarks, they matched IE's Favorites bar shortcut of Accelerator+I* (quite why Microsoft chose that I'm not sure). They carried on the pattern, matching the third sidebar shortcut key to IE's third Explorer bar shortcut key, despite the fact that Downloads and Search are completely different. This shortcut key was kept when Downloads became a window. Until now that is, when it became Accelerator+Y (which is bad because Accelerator+Y should be Redo matching the Accelerator+Z of Undo).

Alex

* Except on Linux where Accelerator+I is used for Page Info**

** They used Accelerator+I for Page Info on Linux because Accelerator+J was needed for the Search bar***

*** They used Accelerator+J for the Search bar on Linux because the Accelerator+K**** was needed for Kill Line

**** Accelerator+K was chosen for the Search bar because Accelerator+;***** had international keyboard issues

***** Accelerator+; was originally chosen for the Search bar because ; is to the right of L on most English keyboards, similar to how the Search bar is to the right of the Location bar in the default Firefox toolbar setup

"The download manager had a very nice background pick in it's list. That looked very cool. It's gone now... The list looks a lot less cool now :-("

by coincidence i was on arvids site here :<http://quadrone.org/graphics/> and noticed that same image on the page. As such It appearrs safe to assume that that image was also part of the Qute theme. However I'm sure the new theme will get a backgrounded of some sort added eventually =)

I believe your login problem is a profile problem. In the past, I've run into that problem on various releases (usually after quite a bit of use) and I've solved it by creating a new profile. It may be solvable by simply removing the formhistory.dat and/or signons.txt files, but I have never tried it myself.

I copy-pasted the bookmarks, prefs, signons, formdata, cookies and cookieperm files from the old installation -- it picked up the bookmarks and formdata, guess the prefs too. (hmmm... didn't edit the paths in there... should!) But it didn't pick up the signons and cookieperms that I copied; it's asking me again for each cookie and showing me all images from sites that I had blocked!

Anyways, I'll try to see if it works. I also ran across another site where the submit button didn't work... But I also had sites where it did work, and asked me if I wanted to remember the passwd yes/no/never. So it's somehow still something site-specific, it seems.

I copy-pasted the bookmarks, prefs, signons, formdata, cookies and cookieperm files from the old installation -- it picked up the bookmarks and formdata, guess the prefs too. (hmmm... didn't edit the paths in there... should!) But it didn't pick up the signons and cookieperms that I copied; it's asking me again for each cookie and showing me all images from sites that I had blocked!

Anyways, I'll try to see if it works. I also ran across another site where the submit button didn't work... But I also had sites where it did work, and asked me if I wanted to remember the passwd yes/no/never. So it's somehow still something site-specific, it seems.

The theme is ugly. It is a serious step backwards and it will be slammed over and over again if this is how it is released. It is not just a case of "a few touch ups and it will be better" its a case of "these icons are so horrible and look so much like Linux themes back in 1999 that it will look like a stone age throw back in my modern desktop environment".

Sorry... I'm sure someone spent quite a bit of time working on these icons but these icons do not feel at home under _any_ operating system or desktop environment. The reload and home buttons alone make me wonder if this the product of someone playing with an SVG tool for the first time. It is not professional at all.

I like the move of "Preferences" to the "Edit" menu but I don't understand how "Themes" can conceptually be under the "Tools" menu. It is not a "tool" its a look preference and should probably be under "Preferences" somewhere.

I also like the fact that the installer now uses gtk+ themed buttons and such though I don't use the installer that often as I prefer RPMs.

I usually don't care too much about the UI. I just use the default theme for native GTK2 widgets -- but damn, the new UI icons are ugly. Egads, possibly someone could take the old UI icons and package them up as a theme and make it available as a 'patch'. ;-)

what file if this info storred in in the event that id wana change it back to where it is now meant to be. Its odd that this has happened but i duno. Anyway how do i clean that up (moving it back to edit) (has had to do a fair bit of clean up with this release =( )

Starting with some of the earlier 0.9 builds, you can now get Firefox running happily on a USB key and carry it around with you. As there are no builds for this, I have a package available for download on my site. Full details about the modifications are listed there. The build weighs in at 8.1Mb and includes a built-in profile.

I for one like this new theme... I used to use the Luna theme, because it blended well with my Windows XP desktop. And before that when I used mozilla, I would hack my own custom theme based on the Classic theme.

But now I have a new theme, for the first time in the history of the Mozilla project I will be using the Default theme!!! My only suggestion for improvement would be to incorporate the FireFox logo somehow into the throbber...Maybe have the fox humping the world or something... hehe.

I was wondering if it is possible to have an option (in the "custom" installation) to keep the profile (or settings) in the program directory without seperate individual profiles. This helps in computers with several accounts (multiple users) where the installed files (extensions) and settings will be the same to all the users. This saves lots of junk (and cache space). This is more useful in certain work places where ndividuals have to login to different terminals at different occasions- the migratory/roaming profile never worked with me. It would be much easier for sysadmins to maintain and/or upgrade to newer versions.

Windows:
FF0.9 RC can import FF0.8 profile only if FF was default browser before FF0.9 RC is run for the first time. This means that you can't uninstall FF0.8 before installing FF0.9 RC because uninstall will reset default browser to IE (it doesn't even matters if FF0.8 was not a default browser, but that's separate issue). To work around wrong data imported into your new profile:
- Install FF0.9 RC and run
- Make FF0.9 RC default browser
- Close FF0.9 RC
- Delete new profile under /mozilla/firefox (make a backup copy if you wish)
- Start FF0.9. It'll import data from your old FF0.8 profile.
Old data is preserved under /phoenix folder.

I've been running the latest Firefox for a little while now and (I don't know if this is because I used Qute for so long) but it seems awfully plain. I'm running 2000, so I can really say if it's just my lack of XP that makes it look so. I much prefer the encircled back/forward buttons. I could probably handle the giant arrows if the reload/stop/home buttons were improved though.

I think the back/forward/reload/stop/home buttons need more depth. The other icons (in prefs, for new tabs/windows, etc.) are fine IMHO. Also, I'm using the small versions of the icons - the large ones look a little better (not much).

Just to clarify - it's only those five icons I'm not fond of. The options page looks snazzy.

After comparing the toolbar icons between 0.8 Qute and 0.9 Winstripe, it looks like the winstripe ones are a few pixels smaller. The extra whitespace might be making the whole toolbar look less than appealing. I'm playing with the CSS to attempt a fix.

Argggghhhhh! I don't like that new theme. I give it a chance but I have to admit that this theme killed my indification with firefox. the quote theme was perfect, constant looking (firefox/thunderbird) and know this mixture of sexed up win95 icons and a copy of mac icons.
The next thing is that they haven't fixed the bug yet that firefox randomly forgets favicons. this has been there since ages and I wonder why it is so hard to fix!
And why did themes and extensions move out from the prefs?

This realease is a dissapointment so far. Sorry for beeing harsh, but this is my opinion and I think they want to hear any critic, if negative or positive!

I posted a couple of comments of my FF0.9 experience, with some interface-nitpicks and in the same post what is for me a showstopper-bug.
Well all responses to my posts were about the interface-nitpicks except 1 useful reply to my mention of a bug. That's both here and on the forums.

You know, I expected more reactions to what I mentioned about a BUG and not so much whining about the interface and how god-be-blessed someone made the old theme available for installation in the new FF.
First time I started FF I didn't like the looks. I was used to Mozilla (the bueish theme) and didn't like the FF look.
Now I've grown to like the FF look and dislike the Mozilla look.
So please stop burning down the interface. Try to be constructive about it. PLEASE.

But since nearly everyone CANT be constructive about it, that's why Ben right now doesn't want to hear it.

Making complaints about the new theme is like crying about the color of a new car that you received for free and that can be repainted for free. How many different themes are there available for this browser? Several that already work with 0.9. How many themes will be available as the browser becomes even more popular? Lots more.

With themes this is where you who are upset can really be part of the solution rather than to simply say you don't like it. Make a new theme. If you know what looks good, then show us all by making a new theme for everyone to enjoy.

I don't know about you, but last time I check all the other themes out there are FREE. The way some folks are complaining you would think they cost you money!

And of course the more you donate to Mozilla the more FireFox folks can be hired to help ;o) .

It's free but I still don't use KDE 1.0 for a reason ya know ;) Personally I'm jsut worried about new users. I know I was attracted to FF because of how it looked back at 0.4...screenshots do say a lot.

Mentions of KDE 1.0 are not comparable. FireFox has other good Theme options of you don't like the default.

Anyone doing a review of FireFox would not be doing a complete review if Themes were not mentioned.

When it comes to default skins the main competition IE does not look much better or worse. I like FireFox because of it's features and that is what makes changing browsers worth while. Can't say I started checking out Mozilla before their current theme because it was "pretty" ;o) . I look at the screen shots for examples of the features.

Maybe this will all spur more new innovative Themes. If that happens then everyone wins!

First, the much disccussed stuff: The theme is wonderful. It's simple. It's clean. Personally, it's perfect with one minor exception: the "new tab" icon doesn't fit the same style as the rest of the icons. If it were just a small, simple tab icon, like a Winstripe version of the way Qute does it. Other than this very small complaint, I absolutely love it!

Second, the important stuff: Wow! It's faster! No kidding. It's noticably faster loading every page. I would guess that Gmail loads about 5 times faster.

Thid, the buggy stuff: Some extensions broken (Synchronize Bookmarks). Right-click "Open in New Tab" doesn't work consistently with bookmarks.

Fourth, the wishlist stuff: The new throbber is cool, but an actual FireFox throbber would be GREAT!

That's just a quick look after using it for an hour.

Originally skeptical after hearing so much negativity, I'm thrilled about the new theme after having used it.

The theme is definitely not 'wonderful', nor are most of the icons as good as the Qute icons. I'm saying that with my objective-judgement hat on. (Subjectively, personally I like the Mozilla theme better than anything Firefox does... would be nice if somebody did a quality unbroken FF version of that before I finally switch. :)

On the other hand, reading some of the comments here you'd think it was as bad as the many shitty themes available for download... it's not. It's sort of just about ok but needs work. Which, for a 'not yet 0.1' release, is pretty good.

Of the main toolbar icons, here are the ones that I feel need attention:

* Reload icon: kind of ugly, a bit cramped and busy. I think I've seen this icon before and I've never liked it. The Qute reload icon was clear and pretty, but I have to say I really like Mozilla reload icon for neat simplicity... it's not as clear though...

* Download Manager, I presume - looks not much like a download manager or indeed anything else. I suppose maybe it looks a bit like a lift (elevator for you Americans) going down? Or perhaps like a petrol (gas) pump? Hrm.

* Calendar - oh no, wait, it ISN'T a calendar icon. Or is it? Er, is that supposed to be 'History'? Come off it. (Note: Qute was fractionally prettier but just as bad recognition-wise, I guess nobody can think of a good icon for history, which is fair enough because neither can I...)

* Bookmarks - my god, this almost looks like a bookmark! This is an improvement over Qute. I think it needs colour changes though; the mark shape is ok but make it look like a real book.

* Print - this looks like a printer but only if you look carefully. The 3D, angled appearance from Qute was a lot clearer. (That actually might apply to several of the icons; I'm not sure the 'straight-on' approach is going to work out as well in the end, the slight angle Qute used was rther nice.)

* Toaster - while it's nice to control your bread settings within Firefox, I think a 'New Tab' icon might be more useful.

The icons I didn't mention are ok, maybe they could be prettied up, but they're recognisable and don't look awful.

Basically I think, yeah these icons are (objectively) not yet as good as Qute; I think the authors would agree. But there's nothing hugely wrong with anything on a fundamental level and (I wasn't paying attention to whoever was designing it) if it's being put together by good graphic designers then I'm sure the theme can be improved to where Qute is now, and beyond.

First, the much disccussed stuff: The theme is wonderful. It's simple. It's clean. Personally, it's perfect with one minor exception: the "new tab" icon doesn't fit the same style as the rest of the icons. If it were just a small, simple tab icon, like a Winstripe version of the way Qute does it. Other than this very small complaint, I absolutely love it!

Second, the important stuff: Wow! It's faster! No kidding. It's noticably faster loading every page. I would guess that Gmail loads about 5 times faster.

Thid, the buggy stuff: Some extensions broken (Synchronize Bookmarks). Right-click "Open in New Tab" doesn't work consistently with bookmarks.

Fourth, the wishlist stuff: The new throbber is cool, but an actual FireFox throbber would be GREAT!

That's just a quick look after using it for an hour.

Originally skeptical after hearing so much negativity, I'm thrilled about the new theme after having used it.

If I open an irc link the chatzilla window appears but just hangs there doing nothing. If I kill it and retry the link, no window apppears. If I then shut FireFox down, there is an instance of FireFox still left running if I look in Task Maanger.

Are you sure? The big removal of Seamonkey cruft in chrome://navigator/ and friends broke Chatzilla, and I'm not sure it's been fixed yet. It's certainly not yet fixed in the version in the Extension Room, which is dated almost a week before that removal even occurred.

Yeah - I successfully installed and ran the latest chatzilla on Firefox 0.9RC today. The version mentioned at extension room is old and wouldn't work, but the extension room link is actually to "latest-xpi", so it will give you 0.9.64 currently, which works.

~Observations and Opinion~
In Arvid's revelatory post of Ben's correspondence with him, he adds as commentary that if Ben had said it was necessary, Arvid would have complied with their licensing wishes. Ben's consequent rebuttal to the revelation includes the comment that he is reluctant to work with someone who unprofessionally posts such non-public correspondence. Arvid however has invested a great deal of himself into Qute as Firefox's default theme, and has had that work secretly usurped without having an opportunity to preserve it. I say secretly usurped because his work is under complete replacement, and this seems to have taken him by surprise.

It has been more unprofessional of Ben to avoid Arvid and go ahead and initiate work on a new theme without first explicitly seeking a compromise from him in licensing.

The other point, about consistency across platforms. Having been the default theme creator and maintainer until now, it is proper that Arvid should have been involved in the creation of any new theme or theme direction instead of being worked around. Ben acted appears to have acted no where in good faith and in some ways deceitfully.

Ben has requested constructive criticism. He refuses to take comments on his public blog on the issue, since he deems the flood of complaints thoroughly unconstructive. He writes that a project relies on strong leadership. Does strong leadership mean ignoring everyone who you are working on behalf of and expecting them to abide one person's unpopular decision and live with it? The volume of complaints seem very constructive. If licensing was a serious issue, and the public were ignoring it, then it might be wise to ignore the public. However, the public have a reason to ignore the licensing issue in this case, since according to Arvid, it did not have to be an issue.

~Suggestion for MozillaZine~
So, I was wondering if MozillaZine will hold a poll regarding the themes and perhaps the reasons people might choose one over the other.
Also, it would be nice to read an article about the new theme explaining what the problem was with the old one, why the change was made, why people dislike it, and where they can find Qute if they still want it. It would be nice to have Arvid's and Ben's tempered opinions as well.

~Suggestions for Mozilla.org~
Following the *instripe convention, would not it be more appropriate for the GNOME localised theme to be called Linstripe? Or does this offend too many KDE and other non-GNOME users? Perhaps it raises too many unpleasant memories of Lindows/Linspire?

Also, the new key for the download menu, ctrl y, is hard to execute with one hand for those with non-large hands. Some people have suggested ctrl d, and the most frequent issue with that is that it is long established as the 'add bookmark' key. I do not see why such tradition should get in the way presently if fundamental and controversial change is already going to happen (that is, the change of default theme). With people already angry, this would be the optimal time to give ctrl d to the download and find 'add bookmark' a new home. The bookmark sidebar already uses both ctrl b and ctrl i . . . and since adding bookmarks is not an eternal activity (one only needs to bookmark a page about once, and there are a finite (though growing) number of pages) while checking your downloads is potentially limitless (until one dies), it would be more convenient to have downloads at the more convenient and more logical ctrl d, and add bookmark at ctrl i (or something).

~Suggestions to the Winstripe artists~
The large icons in winstripe are so small that they seem distant and solitary and alone. This might also be an effect of the depth perspective of the back and forward arrows. I find this disturbing and unpleasant. Would you be able to create a more secure and comfortable feeling, perhaps by bringing the icons nearer each other or making their images large enough so they seem closer?

~Bugs~
When changing themes, I suffer significant dataloss, in that all the pages I had open go blank, though their icons in the tabs remain.

~Compliments~
When I installed 0.9, all my bookmarks, autocomplete, etc were still in tact. Kudos.
Also, I finally found the stand-alone Qute (linked above) and quite enjoy its improvements, particularly the new tab button, but also very much the colour-consistent home button.

I'm pleased to see the decrease in download size with the Windows version, but why have the Mac and Linux builds not undergone the same slimming-down operation? Is there some reason that they can't be made any smaller, or is this going to be addresses before the 1.0 release?

The Windows installer uses a third-party compressor that makes it smaller; currently this is not available for Mac / Linux.

Having said that though... It appears that the SDK is LGPL/CPL licensed (see 7zip.org); so a self extracting archive doesn't seem impossible, if you can get people to run that. I was under the impression that Macs just used disk images though.

I imagine size reductions by cutting stuff out will continue to happen on all three platforms.

Good grief! It sounds like 0.9 is a step backwards from the overall opinion being expressed here. Too much talk about themes, too.....who cares? Just get a new theme if you don't like the default theme, right? Am I missing something here?

More importantly (to me, anyway) .... are there any tabbed browsing enhancements or is one still reliant largely on TBE or some combination of tabbed browsing extensions? Has anyone used TBE with 0.9RC successfully ---- any problems noticed so far?
What performance enhancements are there?

Give it the week or two until 0.9...the remaining larger bugs should be ironed out by then.

As for tabbed browsing, there are some improvements. There are warning dialogs for potential dataloss situations when tabs are closed, but aside from that there's not a whole lot. Personally, I'm still hoping for a hidden pref for which tab should be made active when the current one is closed, and I also want draggable tabs. Those require backend work, however, so you almost certainly won't see those for Firefox 0.9 (or 1.0, for that matter). Pretty much everything else is the same.

One nice tab feature you *will* see for 1.0, however, is a way to set how external applications open URLs (in a new tab/new window/same tab/same window/etc.). However, that certainly won't be in 0.9.

Overall, I think 0.9 stability-wise will be either slightly below 0.8 or on a par with it. Everything's still beta, so I can't really complain. 1.0 will be when Firefox is truly stable.

You can notice the vast difference in the number of posts, 109 vs 5.
As a foundation policy, it seems to be wiser to fight each battle seperately (browser and the emaail client). Taking a share of IE market is dificult by itself; taking a share of the outlook market is even more of an uphill battle.

Nah, Seamonkey should adopt Qute as the default theme. It would be amusing to watch all the hardcore Firefox fanboys suddenly denounce Qute as outdated or ugly or something.

Seriously, why is anyone surprised at the theme change, or the manner in which it happened? It must surely be pretty obvious to everyone that the firefox team (i.e. Ben) do exactly what they like without regard for anyone else. It's been going on for ages at the code level but apparentley most people only care if it happens with something as blindingly obvious as the default theme. At least with the theme, there has been some warning (the formation of a 'Visual Identity Team' that didn't include Arvid).

On the other hand, Firefox is arguably* the best web browser around. Maybe the code first, absorb crticism later, approach has helped the product improve.

In the article about Mozilla suite, nothing in the 1.7RC3 release was major enough, such as a theme many found very ugly, to generate posts. This says nothing about the interests in each project. For example if the develop[ers were to, for example, remove the sidebar from Mozilla suite, and you would very likely see the number of posts for the suite at over 100++++.

Firefox 0.9 RC (well it claims its 0.8.0+ but close enough) is nicey nice. But lets see, 119 responces in the Firefox thread, and 5 responces in the (bloated) Mozilla 1.7 RC3 thread. Does that tell anyone anything? :-)

Not diggin the new theme that much should be a bit more interesting or something, but its not bad and easy enough to change when i get tired of it.

It tells me that mozillazine is severely biased towards firefox (a trend you won't see, for example, in slashdot) and that this release includes a flamewar-making new theme, which everyone is basically complaining against.

Being an application developer, I see a lot of icons & applications.
Firebird/Firefox captured my imagination with it's appearance, extensible functionality and usability.
This was the first skinable application where I had the theme set to the default. The Qute icons did an excellent job implementing the XP icons design standards set by Microsoft, and offering something different

As for the comments by some criticising certain peoples' abilities, morals and professionalism: I think it is very short sighted to behave in such a manner. Firefox & Thunderbird are among the top open source projects in the world today.

Obviously, as per the comments by the developers of the new theme, WinStripe is in a very early iteration. I'm looking forward to see how they take the comments and reaction and use it to bring us a theme we are all proud to display on our computers.
Currently though, theme against theme - of course Qute wins - hands down! I really do hope the lads can get *inStripe up to the excellent standards Arvid brought to the table with Qute.

The Firefox directory (which stores preferences, profiles, etc) moved from "~/Library/" to "~/Library/Application Support/". Any particular reason for this? I guess "Application Support" is a better place for it, but a little warning would be nice. When 0.9rc imported my profile (from Mozilla?), everything was out of date because I hadn't used Mozilla for awhile. For some reason, 0.9rc ignored the profile in 0.8's (plus nightly builds') "~/Library/Firefox/" directory, so I had to manually move my bookmarks. It took me a minute to find the new folder (well, actually to realize that it wasn't using ~/Library/Firefox and then find the new one)...

Just out of curiosity, am I the only person whose 0.8 prefs, etc. were ignored with the update?

0.9rc likes to lock up on my machine if I ask it to clear the download history...

I have been having quite a few issues with the download manager for awhile now, both with more recent (e.g. the last month or two) nightly builds of 0.8 as well as 0.9...mostly sluggishness, slow redrawing, and occasionally causing the whole app to lock up...

I just upgraded from .8 to .8+ (.9?) and all of my .8 stuff has disappeared...... bookmarks and everything else gone :-( All seems to have now are the bookmarks from IE <gag> how do I get MY bookmarks back?

That's because Firefox was importing from whatever it thought your default browser was, assuming that that was what you wanted. As a result of lots of people like you having this problem, this has now been changed so that it will ask where you want to import from, rather than assuming.

Your old Firefox stuff should still be there, you just need to find it and copy it over to your new profile - if you need help with that, the forums would be a better place to ask.

Does it disturb anybody else that when you click the read mail button it opens up MS Outlook Express? Shouldn't it open up my default mail client which is mozilla mail?

Sad...very sad.

I have a suggestion: Ship with more than one theme. So what the download size is bigger. I'd like to have a few really nice ones to show to people. Oh and this default theme of FF0.9 is embarrasing. I won't bring to anyone's attention 0.9 is out.

In your Windows Program and Access defaults make sure MS Outlook Express is not set as the default. Personally, I use the full version of MS Outlook as my mail client and when I click the Read Mail button that is what opens. It probably is a Windows setting issue more than a FireFox issue, since FireFox is probably just calling for Windows to open the default mail client.

OK, given the "have more themes by default" suggestion, the question then becomes, how many? Which ones? So maybe the themes page at <http://texturizer.net/firefox/themes/> could tell the folks at Mozilla what the most downloaded theme is. Then Mozilla could work with the developer to make sure that theme works flawlessly with FireFox 0.9. Then include that as an additional theme in FireFox.

>Program and Access defaults
this is not available unless you have Win XP SP1. I don't have SP1. Mozilla Mail is set as my default mail client in the mozilla preferences. This is definitely something wrong with how FireFox is working with the default setting. You could blame windows or mozilla mail but Firefox has to work with those. Let's get this thing working with the software the it's supporters use.

No software maker should be responsible for supporting users that don't have a current SP installed. Netscape and plenty of others fought pretty hard just for that to be added to Windows. Get the SP, then see if you have a problem. Since you don't have the SP that more than shows it probably is an OS issue and not a problem with Firefox.

When I heard it was bad (the dominating opinion on all of the forums I saw) I decided to hold off until I had seen the new theme myself. Ben Goodger asked for constructive criticism so here is some:

I don't like the new theme and here's why: the icons don't have anything in common except that they have nothing in common. Some of them are quite nice individually but the overall look is inconsistent. They all have different colors, some are plain and bright (e.g. the butt ugly green back button) and others look like an almost good Arvid rip off (e.g. the history button). But the latter is too detailed and fussy to be a real Arvid. Then there's the go button: smaller and a little more annoying green than the back button.

I'm glad the download window is no longer giving us the finger but does it really have to be that dull?

I'm one of the many who actually liked the old theme (one of the best themes I saw, ever). I don't see how this theme is going to get better aside from redesigning all icons. It's just that bad. Even compared to some of the third party themes it is quite amateurish. I'm very sorry the old theme was dumped over political issues and I strongly urge the mozilla developers to reconsider. Quality should be the deciding factory here and this lacks quality. Ben Goodger talks about leadership and design by committee on his blog. Well I ask the the comittee to show some leadership here. Being a good leader also means admitting when you are wrong and takes a lot of bad taste to claim this theme is somehow better than the old one.

On a positive note, this will make for a good stress test of the theme management UI :-).

I tried firefox 0.9. on some web pages the fonts are so small they are nearly illegable, while other fonts are quite big. If I browse the same page with Mozilla I don't see this huge difference in font sizes.

I already tried increasing the minimum font size setting, it has no effect that I can see.
Using Ctrl+ /- will work, however, on some web pages, some of the fonts are tiny, while other fonts are normal size, so increasing magnification makes the normal size font too big. The same web page rendered on Mozilla 1.4.1 shows all fonts okay without any need for adjustment (the small fonts are smaller, but not microscopicly small)

I'm rather confused.
I know I've got 0.9 installed, however the Add/Remove programs dialouge tells me it's 0.8, and the About box tells me it's 0.8+
Is this what it's supposed to say until the final is released?

What bugs in particular? There are some that are benign or visual feedback issues (like not showing detailed error messages for network failures, or displaying old-style extensions) but are there any problems with installation, disabling, enabling and removal of properly-coded 0.9 compatible extensions?

I installed only 0.9 compatible extensions, and restarted FF. All were listed in the Ext Mgr but none worked. I deleted chrome\chrome.rdf and the extensions directory, and reinstalled same extensions. This time they work.

Well, at least for me no XPI is needed - Firefox Help and DOMi never show up in a custom install using the Win32 installer (apparently in other builds as well from comments in the bug). The problem is bug 244479. Luckily, I'm smart enough to search through installed-chrome.txt and dele the few extraneous lines for registering Help chrome/skin/locale (no idea why they're there), but the average user would have no clue where to begin searching for the solution to the problem.

I'm amazed to see lots of people thinks Qute was the best thing since sliced bread. Come on guys, if qute' isnt suitable for Firefox for some reason they change it, besides.

Yes new theme is incomplete and has some problems. maybe a better sizing (screenshots from forums, laketrout's comments <http://forums.mozillazine…php?t=82732&start=165>) would be better, But, come on, its only 4 (four) small icons you see when you install Firefox, majority of people will never see much of the other icons at all. And I'm sure all issues about them will get solved eventually. there are still issues on Qute too, its reload and stop icons were very weak since the beginning.

It's when I right-click and pick "Save Link As...". But in 0.8, when you right-clicked on a link, wasn't there a "Save Link to Disk" (or something) option, which bypassed the Save As dialogue? This was pretty convenient for downloading songs and movies.

Testing showed that there were two use cases, one wanting to save a file (like an image, or a link) somewhere specific, and we offered no way to accomplish this - and people wanting to automatically download links somewhere... now you can do the latter by holding down Alt while you click a link....

I experienced problems with forms not submitting, similar to what tnleeuw (comment #31 above) described. I did a couple of fresh installs (manually removing profile folders, etc. inbetween) and the problem continued - I've switched back to 0.8 for that reason. Any ideas?
Also, is there an easy way to update the (new?) hostperm.1 profile file - which contains the list of hosts to ignore when loading images for ad-blocking purposes? Using a list over at BlogZilla (<http://www.deftone.com/bl…archives/ad_blocking.html>) I had to search/replace in Microsoft Word of all things to "generate" my own list in the same style that Firefox was generating it.

Lastly if anyone has a brief explanation for how to manually install a theme please let me know. I was playing around renaming .jar files and subsequently updating the "installed-chrome.txt" file, but my efforts resulted in an XML error and Firefox not even starting. ;)

- my mouse buttons to go "backwards" and "forward" have stopped working. They still work with my 0.8. TO make them work with 0.9rc I have to manually relaunch "imwheel"
- I don't have the mozilla icon anymore (the one that moves when a page is loading, I'm sure it has a name). That, however might be because I customized it on my 0.8

0.8 and 0.9rc are not (obviously) in the same folder.

What I *love* in 0.9 is that apparently the fonts have been changed. It's much more readable (the fonts used to display the web pages, not the UI)

The Intellimouse back/forward buttons have never worked in Linux - I'm not sure why they worked for you in 0.8. The functionality has been added to the trunk, so after 1.0 you'll see them work. I can't remember the bug number; see <http://squarefree.com/burningedge/> and look for the changes list since Firefox branched.

Like many, I do not care for the new theme BUT this is not a complaint about that. I am totally fine with the theme not being what I want, especially for a beta.

But I cannot get new themes to install. It acts like it is installing them, it asks if I want it to be just for this user or not, says successful, but then... nothing. Under Tools->Themes is just the FireFox default.

Now that's a bad combo- a theme that is not appealing coupled with no easy way to change the theme.

In 0.8 and previous (linux), clicking once in the address bar completely selects the contents, allowing you to type a new address. This feature appears to have disappeared in the 0.9 build. Am I mistaken? Was this only a feature in past Windows versions?

Not to jump the gun, but I'm jumping the gun. I want to deploy Firefox 0.9 ASAP to my company, just waiting for the release.

You know what finally convinced my manager to recommend this? Security! So many people were surfing the web with IE, non-business related surfing, and getting spyware and adware and trojans and the like, that one of the steps to remedy it was to take my recommendation and switch everyone to FireFox. Security, THE big issue in IT now, and possibly a driving force for Moz apps if marketed correctly.